Back End / Saved Games

I have never programmed a game before, and was wondering if you all had ideas or good resources on how to deal with saved games. Will we have any kind of database on the back-end or some kind of encrypted file to save the user's game? I am currently playing Legends 1 and I suppose we can have certain states for where in time the gamer is at, as well as storage for the current inventory, money, critical choices in dialog made in the story, etc.

While working with Torque Game Engine, I created a subroutine in a save point system to constantly update a .txt file, it lagged the game slightly, and had issues when people booted from combat, it was for an alpha build so you could recover from a crash, but I might be able to modify the system to update at check points fairly easily.

In that kind of format, it's simple, and is relatively easy to create a program that reads it, granted it's not pretty and can be easily modified (Hacked). Add on an algorithmic encryption function to keep hackers away and make it more efficient, and you'd have a robust save function. it's a little heavy on the string function, but it could work...

While it's not up to me, it's my two cents.

I might be able to get an output component built in a few hours of work, granted, I don't have any hours for that kind of work anytime soon...

Makes it harder for a person to modify it, but on the flip-side, it'll force us to integrate a decryption program into the read function, perhaps a cypher system would work better, flip out one letter for another, then reverse it for the other way around. I know I could build a program for that, it would just take a while...